Compared to the capabilities of Google Earth, the current generation of seat back in-flight tracking is pretty poor. Even forgetting the eye candy the availability of tracking data from providers like FBO should allow a much more dynamic view of the world with you able to see the position of your own flight in relation to everyone else's...

It actually looks like this might be a good idea for Google. It would put Google WiFi and Google Earth directly in-front of a fairly high powered audience, and a captive one at that, it might even be worth it for "brand awareness" purposes alone. So, an idea that might just fly, so to speak...

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.